It’s the humblest deep movie of recent years, a work in the same vein as American marginalia like “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Trees Lounge,” but with its own rhythm and color, its own emotional temperature, its own reasons for revealing and concealing things.

Angelina Jolie's First They Killed My Father is far and away her best work as a director: a rare film about a national tragedy told through the eyes and mind of a child, and as fine a war movie as has ever been made.

Maybe the heart of the problem is that Kate and Meg's behavior doesn't track with the practical realities of lifelong, functioning friendship between (most) women as experienced by...well, any functioning adult who lives in the world.

Co-directors Éric Summer and Éric Warin and their collaborators seem determined to crush the life out of an original premise and many promising characters by stealing every available page out of a substandard American studio animated feature’s playbook.

What elevates it and makes it special is the attention it pays to local geography and atmosphere, the mundane aspects of working-class Northeastern U.S. life, and the culturally super-specific types of people you'll find in that environment

The movie is put together with the no-fuss confidence of Soderbergh's best entertainments, staging comedic banter and suspense sequences with equal assurance, even playing sly perception games with the audience by making you wonder how smart or dumb the characters (and the movie) actually are.

Whenever the movie reaches for poetry it lands somewhere in a chain drugstore's greeting card aisle, trying to choose between one that shows an adorable child laughing in a Photoshopped field of sunlit daisies, one that tries for gallows humor but isn't really that funny, and a third with a quote about mortality and wisdom only seems thoughtful because it's written in cursive.

This is a movie of vision and integrity made on an epic scale, a series of propositions dramatized with machinery, bodies, seawater and fire. It deserves to be seen and argued about. They don't make them like this anymore. Never did, really.

The movie is a throwback to an earlier era of documentaries, when filmmakers did not feel obligated by commercial pressure to give their film the shape of a thriller, a sports film, a mystery or anything else, but instead simply brought their cameras into people's lives.

This is one of Scott’s best-directed movies and one of his most entertaining overall, partly because he’s working in a genre, the science fiction spectacle, that he does better than anyone since Stanley Kubrick, but also because he seems to be approaching it almost entirely in terms of visceral impact and emotion—as symphony of fire and blood, poetry and schlock.

Those who don't know anything about the tale going in (a category that included me) might be gobsmacked by what happens. The order of events doesn't stick to any established commercial movie template. What happens feels as random yet eerily inevitable as life itself.